A diptych image shows on the left a first edition of the children’s book “Millions of Cats” in a black frame under glass and on the right an image of a painting in pink black and grey of a torso of a woman in flowered underclothes seen from the rear with a hand —whose long fingers have bright red fingernail polish — holding a black cat, which is partly cut off, with only one paw reaching down and clawing the woman’s clothes. — (left) Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág, New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., first-edition, 1928 (right) Christina Ramberg, “Shady Lacy” 1971, Acrylic on Masonite, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Anne d’Harnoncourt and Joseph Rishel, photos courtesy of author.

Two women-artist must-see exhibits – during Women’s History Month, no less – are the Wanda Gág and Christina Ramberg shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For those who draw, which should be everyone, the exhibits are nourishment for the soul, for “Drawing, like eating and sleeping, belongs to the universal and inevitable things of life.” – Wanda Gág

Both skilled craftsmen in their own right, each artist sewed their own clothes. Wanda Gág inks on sandpaper while Christina Ramberg paints on sandpapered masonite.

Wanda Gág

Wanda Gág is a well-known children’s book illustrator and writer whose book Millions of Cats won a Newbery award in 1929. On display (Philadelphia Museum of Art Easter Egg #1) with Wanda Gág’s drawings is a signed copy of the first edition, owned by Rene d’Harnoncourt, though its crayon- scribbled enhancements were no doubt added by the book’s true owner, the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, daughter of Rene and beloved director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1982 to 2008.

A diptych image shows on the left, a yellow book with a red and yellow image in the center and words,“Gone is Gone or The Story of a Man Who Wanted to do Housework” by Wanda Gág author of “Millions of Cats;” and on the right a page from the book with an illustration of a mother, father and toddler child dressed in peasant garb, with words, “Gone is Gone” and it is the story of a man who wanted to do housework. This man, his name was Fritzl — his wife, her name was Liesi. They had a little baby, Kinndli by name, and...” — “Gone is Gone” by Wanda Gag, image courtesy of the author.

The story captures Gág’s dark humor found throughout her children’s books. (Check the Museum Store for Millions of Cats and other books by Gág.) The also darkly humorous Gone is Gone, derived from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, underlines Gág’s feminist beliefs. Gone is a Bohemian fairytale told to her in German as a child growing up in a German-speaking town in Minnesota. The author’s dedication reads “For my peasant ancestors.” While this story exists within Grimms’ Märchen (fairy tales), Gág decided to write it how it was recited to her, keeping what she describes as “sly peasant humor” she enjoyed as a child. Gone is Gone is an oral narrative about a man who thinks his wife’s household chores are frivolous compared to his own day labor as a farmer. They agree to switch roles for the day and hence the hilarity begins, calamity after calamity. I recommend collecting these books whether you have children or not.

A detailed ink drawing on sandpaper from 1927 shows a long-necked, dinosaur-esque machine with wheels resting on planks of wood in a ditch surrounded by dark overhanging vegetation of a suffocating and threatening nature and a Van-Gogh-esque swirling sky in the background. — “Stone Crusher” by Wanda Gag, 1927, Black ink applied with brush and crayon with white opaque watercolor on sandpaper, image courtesy of the author.

The hallway exhibit does not feature illustrations from those books but the charm found in her children’s book illustrations does emanate. Artworks on display from the museum’s collection for the first time are primarily crayon and ink on sandpaper from her home and neighboring landscapes. Her expressive line marking is reminiscent of Van Gogh, an artist who inspired her. Her landscapes undulate, and inanimate objects become animated. In particular, two drawings of inanimate objects I enjoyed were of an egg beater and a stone crusher. Perhaps because David Lynch recently passed away, Gág’s “Stone Crusher” drawing seems Lynchian to me, in the sense that her drawing brings to life a mechanical object with a personality all it’s own, taking on the personage of the human spirit, the Industrial Age personified. As an artist Gág defined themselves as anti-capitalist and illustrated for leftist magazines, so this “Stone Crusher” could very well be screaming “Workers rule the world!”

A detailed ink drawing from 1929 shows an egg beater sitting on an empty pie plate on a checked tablecloth with salt and pepper shakers and a small pot in the background. — “Eggbeater” by Wanda Gag, 1929, Black ink applied with brush over traces of graphite on wove paper, image courtesy of the author.

Though they depict beautiful scenes from nature, there’s a quiet darkness and eeriness that is underlaid in each of her drawings, in essence the wobbliness of life. Her drawing of an egg beater reminds me of Lee Lozano’s closely cropped tool paintings, calling to mind more than meets the eye, a feminist critique, women’s liberation or sexual innuendo. Wanda Gág was a suffragist after all. The title description here recalls Wanda Gág’s words about her still lifes “–each thing had a personality and a life of its own, and all arranged themselves in ready-made compositions about me.” Her expressive lines bring humor to some of her drawings, vitality to others, along with a vibrating spirituality, which begs you to think more about what you are seeing. If you are at all interested in comics, illustration or painting there is much to glean from this little Korman Galleries 221-223 hallway PDP (Prints, Drawings and Photographs) exhibit, Wanda Gág: Life for Art’s Sake. I’m not sure how long these drawings will be up, but this show just opened, so go now! It pairs nicely with viewing Christina Ramberg’s Retrospective.

See more works by Wanda Gág in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake, is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Christina Ramberg

A black and white photo blow up on a wall shows a smiling young woman with dark hair and eyeglasses in her studio with an orange tabby cat on her lap and working drawings on the desk and images on the wall and below the image, a glass-covered shelf with little notebooks of the artist’s in it. — Studio portrait of Christina Ramberg with artist’s scrapbook display on view at the PMA, image courtesy of the author.

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective hails from the Art Institute of Chicago curated by Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale and organized for the PMA by Eleanor Nairne, head of Modern and Contemporary with Camila Rondon, Coordinator of Contemporary. The exhibit sprawls three galleries, Morgan, Korman and Field (150-155) along the Modern and Contemporary Wing. On display are a very large number of works, “including paintings, quilts, sketchbooks, and archival ephemera,” chronicling the artist’s entire career. Christina Ramberg’s life was cut short at 49 and this exhibit is a beautiful testament to the spirit of an artist’s work ethic. Time is the ever present enemy for an artist, one can never have enough, and Ramberg’s meticulous craftsmanship paired with her diligent research-driven practice, both inward and outward, resonates throughout this retrospective. She was a mother, a teacher, an artist, a quilter, and she sewed her own clothes, it is a miracle she got this much done. I can barely commit time to a pair of paperbag pants.

A painting of a woman’s lush head of hair from the rear, in blacks and ochre’s with swirling rhythms like the hair is a river, and what looks like it might be a glacier or some other topographical feature cascading downward, also in rhythm with the swirling hair. — Christina Ramberg, “Lola La Lure” (one in a triptych), 1969, acrylic on masonite in artist-painted wood frame, image courtesy of the author. Compare this work with Joseph Yoakum’s “Briar Head Mts of National Park Range of Bryce Canon National Part near Hatch Utah, U.S.A.” (below)

A pastel drawing in aqua, pale yellow and green and blue shows a birds-eye view of stylized mountains, a river and many trees in the landscape. — Joseph Yoakum, “Briar Head Mtn of National Park Range of Bryce Canyon National Park near Hatch, Utah U. S.A.,” c. 1969, blue-black and black ballpoint pen and colored pencil on paper sheet: 50.8 × 60.96 cm (20 × 24 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Donald and Nancy de Laski Fund.

From brushstrokes to thread stitching, time is marked in this exhibit. How our fleshly bodies can only accomplish so much. Her work has been categorized along with fellow artist peers of her time known as the Chicago Imagists, though she disdained being labeled as such. True enough the artists paired within the category: Jim Nutt, Barbara Rossi, Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Ray Yoshida were inspired via the same milieu. The Chicago Imagists were described as the antithesis of the New York art scene. Pop Art, the defining movement in New York at the time, found inspiration in mainstream comics and popular advertisements, whereas the Chicago Imagists found inspiration in alternative comics media and self-taught artists. Collecting was considered part of their art practice for the Chicago Imagists. They collected mass produced or found objects, displayed them in their studios, apartments and as installations in art galleries. This was an influential part of Christina Ramberg’s artistic practice, from the compositions in her paintings to the fabric she collected for her quilts (Japanese kimonos, thrifted leopard print t-shirts and more), to found material and outsider art. In addition to collecting objects, Ramberg collected images, she photographed her street observations and works of art and had a slide collection of these images.

Along with her husband Phillip Hanson and teacher Ray Yoshida, Ramberg kept scrapbooks of comics and magazine clippings from women’s magazines. Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” is present in both Ramberg’s comic scrapbooks and doll collection (seen in the exhibition). And Batman, of course. Her brushstrokes are pulled from the pages of comics, and today remind me of inks from Heather Benjamin or Nate Garcia (who are affordable). Ramberg’s paintings’ and quilts’ color palettes are imbued with the influence of comic art as well, muted colors from a four-to-five-color newspaper press. The outsider artists of influence for Christina and other artists in the Chicago Imagist scene were notably Lee Godie and Joseph Yoakum, each living and working in Chicago. Her later works nod to French outsider artist Augustine Lesage. Later in her career Christina showed her quilt work at Carl Hammer Gallery which exhibited contemporary self-taught “outsider” artists.

Both Ramberg’s paintings and quilts call out a contradiction constant in her artwork: Is her work fetishistic, or is it feminist critique of the male gaze? As a quiltmaker is she tapping into a long networked history defined as women’s craftwork, or is it high art? Why not both and everything? Her art doesn’t pretend to solve these problematic contraindications. Ramberg’s illustrations can be found in the pages of Playboy magazine. Her cropped bodies suggest bondage. Themes of masturbation and S&M fetish proliferate in her works in the late 60s early 70s. The themes of bondage displayed in wrapped hands evolve even further into acrotomophilia, the sexual attraction to amputees. The most perverted are her cropped torsos where skin itself folds into itself. In some instances pubic hair protrudes from crevices. The torsos drawn from depictions of Christ on the cross contort to look like bulging penises and vaginas. I can see these paintings hanging in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment or someone’s closet.

A painting of a stylized female torso from chin to above the knees shows the figure falling apart or bandaged, mummy-like together, missing body parts like a hand or even the entire right side of the body. — Christina Ramberg, “Schizophrenic Discovery,” 1977, image courtesy of the author

Like most liberal-leaning feminists in the 1970s Ramberg struggled with contradiction, wanting to be free to express their sexuality all while balancing having a career and wanting the traditional female archetypal life: marriage and children. Her painting, “Schizophrenic Discovery,” of a female figure framed, broken and disassembling, illustrates these feminine contradictions. It is my view that it is uniquely true that women are walking contradictions, the basic fabric of our bodies demands this. Ramberg was making art about women’s bodies on the cusp of gender studies which was only just beginning to dominate feminist discourse in higher education through the late 1980s early 1990s.

Quiltmaking, which later took center stage within Ramberg’s artistic practice, was defined as a woman’s practice until the 1970s, marked by an exhibition of quilts at the Whitney Museum of Art entitled, Abstract Design of American Quilt where craft vs art came into question. Around this time many feminist artists, Miriam Shapiro, Judy Chicago among them, began to incorporate quilt-making and embroidery in their art as a form of criticism in what was defined as high/low art and the exclusion of women artists within art history. Throughout Christina Ramberg’s work she is aesthetically commenting on these high/low art and feminist critiques. On display in the last gallery is work made towards the end of her career: a series of her quilted artworks paired with her chairback paintings and origami compositions, which align her practice overall with object making. Sanded, refined brushstrokes on masonite boards with hand painted frames sit beside fabric compositions with needle and thread. Her last paintings, loosely painted on an uneven canvas surface, depict a series of numbered Untitled paintings with vessel-like compositions. They are reminiscent of her early “Corset/Urns” compositions and the loose linework found in her sketchbook drawings.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Easter Egg #2. The first Christina Ramberg painting I ever saw is in this exhibit, “Shady Lacy” 1971, courtesy of Joseph Rishel who was curator of European Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and married to Anne d’Harnoncourt. (see image at the top). Rishel passed away at 80 in November of 2020, good for him. Rishel and d’Harnoncourt gifted “Shady Lacy” to the museum.

The accompanying catalog for this exhibit “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” is gorgeous and a major contributor towards writing this article, specifically the essays; “Mother, Artist, Friend” by Mark Pascale, “Parallel Manipulations: Christina Ramberg’s Art and Archive” by Thea Liberty Nichols, “Christina Ramberg’s Diary: 1969-1980” by Judith Russi Kirshner and “Building Blocks: Christina Ramberg’s Quilts” by Anna Katz.

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, Philadelphia Museum of Art, until June 1st, 2025.
Read another recent article by Beth Heinly on Artblog.

Strong work by Wanda Gág and Christina Ramberg at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

By Beth Heinly March 13, 2025

Beth Heinly enjoys two exhibits at the PMA and pairs them here - art by two women, Wanda Gág and Christina Ramberg, strong women, strong work. Both exhibits are up for a while, and Beth says they are must-sees, saying, "For those who draw, which should be everyone, the exhibits are nourishment for the soul." Now on at the Philadelphia Museum of Art main building. Christina Ramberg exhibit closes June 1, 2025.